“Everywhere I go, people tell me that if I am impeached, they’re going to watch it,” he said. “The ratings are going to be through the roof.” He said that he expected his impeachment ratings to be “many, many times” the size of the audience for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998. “It’s not even going to be close,” Trump said. “The ratings for Bill Clinton’s impeachment were a joke.”

If you wondered about Trump’s understanding of impeachment, here’s another quote from the same source: (emphasis mine, as always)

Asked about the recent impeachment of the former South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Trump said, “Did anyone even watch that one? That was Korea. Nobody cares.” As for the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, he said, “I didn’t hear about that one. I don’t follow Brazil. I like Argentina. I saw ‘Evita’ many, many times. Andrew Lloyd Webber did a great job. Millions and millions of people loved it. But that was a Broadway show, not an impeachment.”

Now let’s go to our earlier ‘how Trump could get fired’ from The New Yorker.

Michael Flynn, who resigned as Trump’s national-security adviser after acknowledging that he lied about his contact with Russia’s Ambassador, is seeking immunity in exchange for speaking with federal investigators, raising the prospect that he could reveal other undisclosed contacts, or a broader conspiracy.

Is trump a peach in sediment? Or do we both have a speech impediment? That’s the dumb question.

Here you will find a UK page on the firing of FBI Director James Comey. By, of course, POTUS Donald Trump.

I will content myself with a few observations. You can read the article by clicking the above hotlink.

Insiders think Comey was fired because he was closing in on Trump and Trump associates with connections to Russia.

Trump said Comey was fired because he messed up the handling of Hilary Clinton’s private eMail server. I won’t bother doing the search, but you can check out this claim: at the time, Trump praised Comey for damaging Hilary.

Comey asked for more resources, and went from weekly to daily updates.

Some commentators and newspapers, including The New York Times, have suggested the President disposed of Mr Comey in a frantic bid to prevent his own impeachment.That is a quote.

The Pledge of Allegiance has had several small tweaks, as you can find in Wikipedia. Here is one version:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Unfortunately, when I say it in my head, I hear the ending as:

libertine justice, for all?

For American readers: are you feeling a growing sense of unease here?

For Trump supporters, is there any conceivable evidence that would shake your undying support for your current President?

For readers (not many, eh?) in other countries, does the current ‘stability’ of the USA let you sleep soundly?

What does it mean when a President fires the head of an agency investigating: questions about his associates, his election (was it manipulated by the Russians), and his former National Security Advisor?

Comey went gentle into that good night. Here’s a final quote:

Mr Comey has not given any interviews since his dismissal, but said in a farewell letter to his colleagues at the FBI: “I have long believed that a president can fire an FBI director for any reason, or for no reason at all. I’m not going to spend any time on the decision or the way it was executed. I hope you won’t either. It is done.”

A final dumb question: do you think Comey is going to be silent forever?

Here you will find a fascinating article about Canada versus the United States of America.

I will quote the opening two paragraphs, and encourage you to read the rest – slowly. As always, emphasis mine.

Title: We Could Have Been Canada. Here goes:

And what if it was a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America—what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy. Look north to Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. Instead, an orderly development of the interior—less violent, and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant. We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada.

The thought is taboo, the Revolution being still sacred in its self-directed propaganda. One can grasp the scale and strangeness of this sanctity only by leaving America for a country with a different attitude toward its past and its founding. As it happened, my own childhood was neatly divided between what I learned to call “the States” and Canada. In my Philadelphia grade school, we paraded with flags, singing “The Marines’ Hymn” and “Here Comes the Flag!” (“Fathers shall bless it / Children caress it / All shall maintain it / No one shall stain it.”) We were taught that the brave Americans hid behind trees to fight the redcoats—though why this made them brave was left unexplained. In Canada, ninth grade disclosed a history of uneasy compromise duality, and the constant search for temporary nonviolent solutions to intractable divides. The world wars, in which Canadians had played a large part, passed by mostly in solemn sadness. (That the Canadians had marched beyond their beach on D Day with aplomb while the Americans struggled on Omaha was never boasted about.) Patriotic pageantry arose only from actual accomplishments: when Team Canada won its eight-game series against the Russians, in 1972, the entire nation sang “O Canada”—but they sang it as a hockey anthem as much as a nationalist hymn.

There is more, much more, in the New Yorker article. I take no pleasure in reading it, but wonder if the much-touted American Revolution, and slavery, did (as the article reasons through) set up the malaise in my southern neighbour country.

Some blogs automatically apply comments; some use algorithms to decide to apply comments, some use add-ons to try to detect spam. So other blogs may approve or deny your comment without human intervention.

I always intervene, and am human.

Some comments are sensible. About 120 have been approved and are visible here. The blog goes backward in time to when it was created (long ago, when the world was young and the rocks were still cooling.)

Many comments are not sensible. Some are in characters other than this alphabet. A few have been pornographic. (Apparently mentioning Donald Trump and ‘tongue in cheek’ was enough to provoke this.) Most are boringly familiar. For example:

I can make money working from home. The amounts vary.

My blog needs SEO tool help.

Weird lists of car insurance in the USA from a provider in the EU.

Clearly self-promoting. Jewellery, Viagra, clothing lines.

Badly written, likely synonym-replacer generated, pidgin English.

What I do depends on my level of annoyance with the sender. I have done the following:

Used a tool at my ISP to prevent entire address ranges from seeing my blog. Much of China is blocked out this way. Entire ISPs.

Found the commenter’s ISP and formally complained. A few users have vanished, likely cut off (until they find another ISP or identity.)

Other actions. (I’m not disclosing any more. Be surprised, eh?)

So, to recap:

If you want to comment, give the blog website a real eMail address (that works) and say something with reasonable English. Your eMail will NOT be disclosed.

What I’d really like you to read is a BBC News page about Donald Trump.

He’s considering renewing something like the Glass-Steagall act. This was, perhaps, the last piece of legislation to be removed (in 1999) that led to the crash of 2008.

Paradoxically, while on the campaign trail, Trump threatened to revoke Dodd-Frank, which was put in by Obama to fix things a bit during the crisis.

You can read the BBC page for yourself; I’ll content myself with quotes, emphasis mine:

Mr McDonald said there are good political reasons why the president might want to take a tough line on the banking industry. “The average little guy loves to hear this, so he’s going to score points with his base and it may not hurt him politically at all because it may not get done,” he said.

Dodd-Frank was designed in part to protect consumer banking operations from riskier investment banking business. Among other provisions, it required banks keep money in reserve at levels the president has said he thinks are onerous on smaller operations.

Finally, on this administration’s ability to promise, measure, and deliver:

Earlier, US Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin said he believed the American economy could be growing at a rate of three percent within two years, thanks to the administrations proposed tax reforms. On the campaign trail Trump promised growth of 4% a year. The economy is currently growing at a rate of 0.7%.